Elliot Jay Stocks is a designer, speaker, and author. He was previously the Creative Director of Adobe Typekit, and is now the co-founder of lifestyle magazine Lagom, the founder of typography magazine (and soon-to-be book) 8 Faces, and an electronic musician recording as Other Form.

Branding The Money Pig

The Money pig is my latest client work: a financial web app being built by those lovely chaps at Decode. The project is currently in its early stages and I’ve spent the last two weeks with my head down in the research and branding phase. The culmination of those two weeks is the logo you see on the site (that’s just one of many pig illustrations, by the way) and a very strong sense of where we’re going to take the brand as a whole. Nothing’s been designed for the actual site yet; that’ll come in January.

For as long as I can remember, I’ve always found it interesting to look through the processes that designers go through, and sometimes I get more pleasure looking at rough sketches for a project than the final thing. For this reason, the Decode team and I thought it’d be fun to share the branding process we went through, so if you’re as geekily interested in these things as I am, have a read of my post on Blog Lettuce Tomato, the project’s development blog. BLT is all part of the transparency we’re trying to get across with The Money Pig, and the idea is for us to collectively document the process of taking the project from idea to launch. It’s a similar approach to what Ryan and Gill did a few years ago with Bare Naked App.

Speaking of my Carsonifriends, there’s another reason it’s such a pleasure to work with Decode on this project: they’ve brought in my former teammate Mel Kirk to handle the social media side of things. Mel and I haven’t worked together since we both worked at Carsonified, so it’s nice to be reunited again.

We’ve got some exciting stuff around the corner (‘the corner’ being next year) and the project involves me producing lots and lots of illustrations, so stay tuned if you’re interested in seeing more and sign up if you’d like to get involved with the beta-testing!